Theodore Sturgeon
Born Edward Hamilton Waldo in 1918, he changed his name to Theodore Sturgeon
in his early teens. He sold his first story, "Heavy Insurance," in 1938 for $5 to
McClure's Syndicate for publication in newspapers. The sale of
"The God in the Garden" to Unknown was his first published SF
story.
His novel, More Than Human, won the International Fantasy Award. His story,
"Slow Sculpture," won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He died on May 8, 1985, and he was posthumously awarded the
World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.

One of the key figures of science fiction's so-called Golden Age,
Theodore Sturgeon stands out from his contemporaries both in the
literary quality of his writing and his focus on creating strong,
complex characters as well as fast-paced plots. He has been an
influence on writers as diverse as Samuel Delany and Ray Bradbury,
and serves as a continuing source of inspiration to SF's younger
generation. His work fell out of print following his death in
1985, but recent years have seen complete reissues of his short
story collections, and a number of reprintings of his novels -- including this one, from Millennium's SF Masterworks series.

Sturgeon is best-known as a short story writer, and More than
Human is definitely a story writer's novel. It's constructed
as three separate novelettes (the central one, "Baby is Three," was
originally published in Galaxy) which together link
up to tell a larger tale. This structure echoes the novel's theme:
the creation and evolution of a Gestalt, a single being composed of
disparate parts that are incomplete alone but together form a
whole.

In the first section, "The Fabulous Idiot," the Gestalt is born, as
its components come together for the first time: Lone, a mentally
defective youth with a powerful telepathic gift; Janie, a stubborn
child with telekinetic abilities; Bonnie and Beanie, twins who are
incapable of speech and yet can teleport their bodies at will; and
Baby, a profoundly retarded infant whose brain works like a
computer. Each of these handicapped, misfit individuals is
incapable of functioning on his or her own, but together they add
up to a complete being: as Baby tells Janie, "the I is all of us."

In the second section, "Baby is Three," the Gestalt grows up,
emerging into the outside world and facing the challenges of
survival. Several years have passed; Lone, the "head" of the
Gestalt body, is dead, and his place has been taken by Gerry, an
abused street urchin consumed by anger and hatred. Handicapped
before because of Lone's limited mental capacity, the Gestalt is
handicapped now by Gerry's moral emptiness. Gerry's ruthlessness
serves the Gestalt, though, for he is willing to do anything to
preserve it against separation.

In the concluding section, "Morality," the Gestalt matures,
completing its evolution into a fully-realized being. Again, many
years have passed; this time the narrative proceeds from the
viewpoint of Hip, a young man who has been the subject of a cruel
experiment by Gerry, and whom Janie, rebelling, decides to rescue.
Ultimately, Hip turns out to be the Gestalt's single missing
element, without which it cannot take the next step in its
development. The question is whether callous, conscienceless Gerry
can accept the necessity of change.

The Gestalt is an idea that preoccupied Sturgeon, who examined it
in various ways in a number of his stories. In More Than
Human, its roots in psychiatry (in which Sturgeon was also very
interested) are clear: the entire middle portion of the book is
framed as a long psychiatric session, in which the Gestalt slowly,
for the first time, achieves self-awareness. Sturgeon's humanism,
and his belief in the transformative power of love, are also
evident here. Many writers who address the "more than human" theme
assume that such super-beings must be hostile toward those they've
evolved beyond (Frank Robinson's classic The Power, which I
reviewed here recently, springs to mind). But rather than a superceding of humanity, Sturgeon's Gestalt represents the greatest
fulfillment of human potential. As such, Homo Gestalt has a moral
duty to guide, inspire, and protect Homo Sapiens -- which is only
logical, for ordinary human beings are the Gestalt's source
material.

More Than Human is powerfully written, in a style both
sinewy and poetic. The characters -- each of whom follows a path of
personal evolution that echoes the evolution of the Gestalt -- are
strongly and compassionately drawn: the story turns on them, on
their weaknesses and their strengths, as much as it does on
Sturgeon's tightly-conceived plot. The structure of the book, with
its separate sections told in very different voices, might in other
hands have seemed disjointed or confusing, but like Homo Gestalt,
Sturgeon attains a transcendence of form: ultimately, the sections
"blesh" -- Sturgeon's term for the Gestalt's awareness, a combination
of blending and meshing -- into a single, integrated whole. (While it
would be nice to theorize that this interplay of theme and
structure was deliberate, it seems more likely that it came about
by default, both because the book sprang from a story and because
Sturgeon was a story-writer first and a novelist second. More
Than Human achieves its transcendence not because of its
structure, but in spite of it.)

Originally published nearly 50 years ago, More Than Human
does not seem dated: the universality of its themes and the depth
of its meditations on the nature and future of humanity are
appropriate for any time. It's a must-read from one of the great
masters of the genre.

Victoria Strauss is a novelist, and a lifelong reader of fantasy and science fiction. Her most recent
fantasy novel The Garden of the Stone is currently available from HarperCollins EOS. For details,
visit her website.